ZADResist website

A self-managed and autonomous website from the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and anti-repressive resistance of the struggle and occupation of land in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, in France, organized by (you?) those who want to participate and feed or translate the content of this website with locally organized activists or other places of struggle. It allows a more accessible communication tool than the "official" sites like the one of the occupation against the project of an airport http://zad.nadir.orgThe website is open to comrades involved in emancipation struggles, releasing areas to defend: streets, neighborhoods, squats, forests, farmland, wetlands or wild lands. For those who want to broadcast messages, analyzes, events, calls, drawings, pictures, videos, documents, etc. Exchange, organize and communicate in a more autonomous, self-managed, secure and supportive way.

This website is a tool for communication, mutualisation, archiving and with a potential for horizontal organization that could help activists resist or subvert the world of control and surveillance. It could also help protect activists against directed information flows from social networks and by engineered censorship or misinformation emitted by mainstream media or advertisements.
This self-managed broadcasting tool also allows us to easily centralize relevant information and translations in any other language, and (should) help us explore decentralized horizontal decision-making in our movements, collective struggles and places.

Ps: the site is still under construction (technically and politically) and we encourage you to register and help us make it live. If it breaks we start again. You can make financial donations with PayPal or help with logistics and needs

Solidarity knows no borders ! <3

Latest Articles

On Wednesday, 19 September, an media activist died from a 15-meter drop from one of the footbridges that connected about 50 treehouses in the Hambach Forest. Cabins built as part of an occupation that started 6 years ago. An occupation that aims to prevent the destruction of the hambach forest by RWE. A cetenarian forest would be replaced by
the extention of the coal mine which has already devoured nearly 4000 ha in 40 years.

On Friday morning, a handful of military cops destroyed reconstructed cabans in the liberated zone (also called the non-motorized zone) east in la ZAD.
Cut in small logs, the structures of « Eugette » and « the tower of A. », and also the stocked materials on the side that were destroyed by the blows of the military forces, were only waiting for a new life.
It was without counting on our anger, that of determined squatters, disseminated to the four corners of the Zone to be defended.

We could explain in detail our point of view on what has happened in la ZAD in recent months, this past year, and even further. We could tell you of our disappointments, our wounds, our feelings from the betrayal, and the fact that many of our companions in struggles left, disgusted and bruised. We could, but it would be to waste even more ink for stories that have already been published largely.
What we want to tell you is that a remaining part of la ZAD continues to carry the same values as when we joined this fight against "the world that wanted the airport", a part that prefers to take the risk to lose everything rather than betray on what she believes in. We are a little bit stunned, but we are trying to bring to life something that resembles us, and for the moment it takes, among other things, the form of a weekly assembly.
This text is intended to tell you that we are still here, but it is especially an invitation to join us, because we do not conceive things without you …

Supporting is participating to AntiRep!Net in showing solidarity and to maintain a wide variety of tools and act with other networks in resisting and fighting back different forms of repression and oppression, some of us do it from the front lines of la ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, fRance. We tend to do our actions and support without to much looking for social recognition. The idea and project exists since 2014. Today the french state wants to wipe la ZAD and some of its ideas, its potential and especially those engaged in more radical or emancipatory concepts of the map, out of existence... or in prison.

I haven't signed the files project nor do i believe in negociation with a State. I don't want to discuss with this oppressor, i just simply and only want to destroy it. But still I feel concerned by this process of legalisation that includes almost all lands and sites on ZAD, this area that I see as a whole and not only as my little home, this last one today being destroyed anyways.
We're calling negociations the injuctions of the prefect, while I really don't see when have we been negociating. When have we won any advantage of this situation? When have we said anything else than “Yes yes madam, we're scared, we're nice people!”? And today again it's still a topic to go and sign the (agricultural) projects, without even waiting for the ones not accepted yet?! One more time, our famous limit of when will we stop being cheated is pushed further.

Some of the plea that are FOR the legalisation and HURRY let's legalise appears absurd to me, I stay puzzled between: are this convinced people fooling their ownself or me? I don't think that we can be smarter than the ennemy when we play his own game.

In the 1970s the French government announced its next major airport expansion in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Nantes. The 200-hectare site, projected to become the third largest airport in the country, represented a massive threat to the environment and drew significant opposition from locals and green campaigners.

Defeated at the time, the project was resurrected in 2003 by the Nantes mayor, who classified it as a public utility, allowing compulsory purchase of the required land.

Over the next 15 years, a community of resistance was established in the region which came to be known as the Zone à Défendre, or ZAD, for short.

Abandoned houses were re-occupied, shack dwellings and road barricades sprung up from 2009 onwards, rallies were held and farm experiments begun on land which had been bought up by the State and marked for the bulldozers.

Filled with anarchist punks, eco-nerds, back-to-the-land neo-peasants, local farmers and political dreamers, ZAD quickly became a cause celebre of the global environmental resistance and a bete noir of successive French governments.

This text was written during fall 2017 on la ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France. Since then, the situation drastically changed when the government announced on January 17 th , 2018 that they are abandoning the airport project. It may seem obsolete to publish this after the “victory”. But, despite the importance this struggle has for me, I didn’t celebrate this victory. I am probably too suspicious and critical about what’s at stake and what’s hiding behind the decision.

In this difficult period for social struggles, the fight against the airport has become a kind of symbol against the capitalist onslaught, as the struggle to not lose in an ocean of defeats. So, trying a critical approach means often being confronted by a defensive reflex to protect an idealized vision. Oh well, here goes...